THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH
Frantz Fanon

"In the industrialized countries the peasant masses are generally the least politically conscious, the least organized as well as the most anarchistic elements. They are characterized by a series of features--individualism, lack of discipline, the love of money, fits of rage, and deep depression--defining an objectively reactionary behavior."--pg. 66

"Racism, hatred, resentment, and 'the legitimate desire for revenge' alone cannot nurture a war of liberation." -- pg. 89

"The colonized man is an envious man."

"...it is common knowledge that for 95 percent of the population in developing countries, independence has not brought any immediate change."

"In 1945 the 45,000 dead at Setif could go unnoticed; in 1947 the 90,000 dead in Madagascar were written off in a few lines in the press; in 1952 the 200,000 victims of repression in Kenya were met with relative indifference--because the international contradictions were not sufficiently clear-cut. The Korean war and the war in Indochina had already established a new phase. But it was above all Budapest and Suez which constituted the deciding moments of this confrontation."


"...Western financiers are wary of any form of risk taking. Their demands, therefore, are for political stability and a peaceful social climate which are impossible to achieve given the appalling situation of the population as a whole in the aftermath of independence. In their search, then, for a guarantee which the former colony cannot vouch for, they demand that certain military bases be kept on and the young nation enter into military and economic agreements. The private companies put pressure on their own government to ensure that the troops stationed in these countries are assigned to protecting their interests. As a last resort these companies require their government to guarantee their investments in such and such an underdeveloped region."--pg. 60

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"He also reveals that my condition has a name: it's a depression. Officially, then, I'm in a depression. The formula seems a happy one to me. It's not that I feel tremendously low; it's rather that the world around me appears high."

--Whatever, Michel Houellebecq

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The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley
The Electric Kool-Aid Test, Tom Wolfe
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
Stanyan Street and Listen to the Worm, Rod McKuen
The Poet Assassinated, Apollinaire
The First Cities, Audre Lord
One Dimensional Man (Herbert Marcuse)
The Maerican Challenge, Schreiber
Soul on Ice, Eldrige Cleaver
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir

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Reading:

Whatever, Michel Houellebecq
(others by him: Platform and Elementary Particles)

The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

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Look for Louis Norton's story, "Owls"

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Kitchen Confidential by NY chef Anthony Bourdain

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Artist: DJ Shadow
Album: Six Days
Year: 2002

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Nice restaurants in Nairobi:

Tamarind restaurant


Carnivore

Trattoria Restaurant

African Heritage Cafe

 
"If your nose runs and your feet smell, you're built upside down."

--The Sopranos, S6D1

 
"Pain is temporary. It may last a minute or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place."

--Lance Armstrong

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Song "Danke Schoen"

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1 star Michelin Restaurant in BEAUNE, FRANCE
Le Jardin de remparts

Geneva, Switzerland club
La Sip

Trendy Geneva bar/club
Contre Jour


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Memphis Style Bar BQ


The Pig
612 N. La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036

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Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets. So love the people who treat you right, forget about the ones who don't and believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said that it'd be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.

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"A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens."

Dune

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"In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in 12 years, we'll be voting for plants."

--Lewis Black

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THE FIFTH MOUNTAIN
Paulo Coelho



Notes from the author:

Whenever I though myself the absolute master of a situation, something would happen to cast me down. I asked myself: why? Can it be that I'm condemned to always come close but never reach the finish line?... It took a long time to understand that it wasn't quite like that. There are things that are brought into our lives to lead us back to the true path of our Personal Legend. Other things arise so we can apply all that we have learned. And, finally, some things come along to teach us.

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BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS
Frantz Fanon


"...if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men."

Louis-T. Achille (1949)
"Insofar as truly interracial marriage is concerned, one can legitimately wonder to what extent it may not represent for the colored spouse a kind of subjective consecration to wiping out in himself and in his own mind the color prejudice from which he has suffered so long. It would be interesting to investigate this in a given number of cases and perhaps to seek in this clouded motivation the underlying reason for certain interracial marriages entered into outside the normal conditions of a happy household. Some men or some women, in effect, by choosing partners of another race, marry persons of a class or a culture inferior to their own race and whose chief asset seems to be the assurance that the partner will achieve denaturalization and (to use a loathsome word) "deracialization.""

"It is the racist who creates his inferior" - pg. 93

"When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle." - pg.116

"It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one day: 'Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you.' And I found that he was universally right...Later I realized that he meant, quite simply, an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro." --pg. 122

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"Intothinair" by Mocean Worker

"Extreme Ways" by Moby

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NY TIMES:

Publisher to Offer Inside Account of Al Qaeda Operative

By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: October 2, 2006
Basic Books says it will soon publish what it calls the first inside account of life as an Al Qaeda operative.

“Inside the Jihad: My Life with Al Qaeda, A Spy’s Story,” by Omar Nasiri, is a first-person narrative of Mr. Nasiri’s time in an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in the 1990’s, followed by a stint as a spy for a Western intelligence service.

The book, which is expected to be announced today and is scheduled to be published on Nov. 20, is a “detailed portrait of a complex man” with a “unique and chilling perspective,” the publisher said in a press release.

But promoting “Inside the Jihad” will be tricky. “It will not be a traditional book tour,” said David Steinberger, the chief executive of the Perseus Books Group, whose imprints include Basic Books, Da Capo Press and Running Press, among others. “There will be no author signings and no Oprah appearances and no morning shows.”

Omar Nasiri, after all, is a pseudonym for someone who lives in hiding at an undisclosed location abroad, where he wrote the book over the last year. Mr. Nasiri will give only a few interviews, timed to the book’s release, and given his ties to Al Qaeda will be unable to enter the United States. One of the interviews is expected to be with the BBC television program “Newsnight,” but his face and voice will be digitally altered to protect his identity.

In the absence of an author able to speak for his work, the publisher is depending on other sources to lend credibility to “Inside the Jihad.” Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Osama bin Laden unit within the Central Intelligence Agency, read the manuscript before publication, Mr. Steinberger said, and key facts in the book were vetted by members of various European security agencies.

Some consumers may be squeamish about buying a book written by a former Al Qaeda member, reformed or not, Mr. Steinberger acknowledged.

Still, he added, “There’s only one way to get an accurate inside view of what goes on in Al Qaeda. The value of understanding what goes on there outweighs any other consideration.”

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NY times article:




Out-of-Body Experience? Your Brain Is to Blame

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Published: October 3, 2006
They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self.

But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body. In another woman, electrical current delivered to the angular gyrus produced an uncanny feeling that someone was behind her, intent on interfering with her actions.

The two women were being evaluated for epilepsy surgery at University Hospital in Geneva, where doctors implanted dozens of electrodes into their brains to pinpoint the abnormal tissue causing the seizures and to identify adjacent areas involved in language, hearing or other essential functions that should be avoided in the surgery. As each electrode was activated, stimulating a different patch of brain tissue, the patient was asked to say what she was experiencing.

Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland who carried out the procedures, said that the women had normal psychiatric histories and that they were stunned by the bizarre nature of their experiences.

The Sept. 21 issue of Nature magazine includes an account by Dr. Blanke and his colleagues of the woman who sensed a shadow person behind her. They described the out-of-body experiences in the February 2004 issue of the journal Brain.

There is nothing mystical about these ghostly experiences, said Peter Brugger, a neuroscientist at University Hospital in Zurich, who was not involved in the experiments but is an expert on phantom limbs, the sensation of still feeling a limb that has been amputated, and other mind-bending phenomena.

“The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence,” Dr. Brugger said.

Scientists have gained new understanding of these odd bodily sensations as they have learned more about how the brain works, Dr. Blanke said. For example, researchers have discovered that some areas of the brain combine information from several senses. Vision, hearing and touch are initially processed in the primary sensory regions. But then they flow together, like tributaries into a river, to create the wholeness of a person’s perceptions. A dog is visually recognized far more quickly if it is simultaneously accompanied by the sound of its bark.

These multisensory processing regions also build up perceptions of the body as it moves through the world, Dr. Blanke said. Sensors in the skin provide information about pressure, pain, heat, cold and similar sensations. Sensors in the joints, tendons and bones tell the brain where the body is positioned in space. Sensors in the ears track the sense of balance. And sensors in the internal organs, including the heart, liver and intestines, provide a readout of a person’s emotional state.

Real-time information from the body, the space around the body and the subjective feelings from the body are also represented in multisensory regions, Dr. Blanke said. And if these regions are directly simulated by an electric current, as in the cases of the two women he studied, the integrity of the sense of body can be altered.

As an example, Dr. Blanke described the case of a 22-year-old student who had electrodes implanted into the left side of her brain in 2004.

“We were checking language areas,” Dr. Blanke said, when the woman turned her head to the right. That made no sense, he said, because the electrode was nowhere near areas involved in the control of movement. Instead, the current was stimulating a multisensory area called the angular gyrus.

Dr. Blanke applied the current again. Again, the woman turned her head to the right. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

PG 2:

The woman replied that she had a weird sensation that another person was lying beneath her on the bed. The figure, she said, felt like a “shadow” that did not speak or move; it was young, more like a man than a woman, and it wanted to interfere with her.

When Dr. Blanke turned off the current, the woman stopped looking to the right, and said the strange presence had gone away. Each time he reapplied the current, she once again turned her head to try to see the shadow figure.

When the woman sat up, leaned forward and hugged her knees, she said that she felt as if the shadow man was also sitting and that he was clasping her in his arms. She said it felt unpleasant. When she held a card in her right hand, she reported that the shadow figure tried to take it from her. “He doesn’t want me to read,” she said.

Because the presence closely mimicked the patient’s body posture and position, Dr. Blanke concluded that the patient was experiencing an unusual perception of her own body, as a double. But for reasons that scientists have not been able to explain, he said, she did not recognize that it was her own body she was sensing.

The feeling of a shadowy presence can occur without electrical stimulation to the brain, Dr. Brugger said. It has been described by people who undergo sensory deprivation, as in mountaineers trekking at high altitude or sailors crossing the ocean alone, and by people who have suffered minor strokes or other disruptions in blood flow to the brain.

Six years ago, another of Dr. Blanke’s patients underwent brain stimulation to a different multisensory area, the angular gyrus, which blends vision with the body sense. The patient experienced a complete out-of-body experience.

When the current flowed, she said: “I am at the ceiling. I am looking down at my legs.”

When the current ceased, she said: “I’m back on the table now. What happened?”

Further applications of the current returned the woman to the ceiling, causing her to feel as if she were outside of her body, floating, her legs dangling below her. When she closed her eyes, she had the sensation of doing sit-ups, with her upper body approaching her legs.

Because the woman’s felt position in space and her actual position in space did not match, her mind cast about for the best way to turn her confusion into a coherent experience, Dr. Blanke said. She concluded that she must be floating up and away while looking downward.

Some schizophrenics, Dr. Blanke said, experience paranoid delusions and the sense that someone is following them. They also sometimes confuse their own actions with the actions of other people. While the cause of these symptoms is not known, he said, multisensory processing areas may be involved.

When otherwise normal people experience bodily delusions, Dr. Blanke said, they are often flummoxed. The felt sensation of the body is so seamless, so familiar, that people do not realize it is a creation of the brain, even when something goes wrong and the brain is perturbed.

Yet the sense of body integrity is rather easily duped, Dr. Blanke said.

And while it may be tempting to invoke the supernatural when this body sense goes awry, he said the true explanation is a very natural one, the brain’s attempt to make sense of conflicting information.

 
"No war can be conveyed over a distance. Somebody sits eating dinner and watching television: pillars of earth blown into the air; cut--the tracks of a charging tank; cut--soldiers falling and writhing in pain;--and the man watching television gets angry and curses because while he was gaping at the screen he oversalted his soup. War becomes a spectacle, a show, when it is seen from a distance and expertly re-shaped in the cutting room. In reality a soldier sees no further than his own nose, has his eyes full of sand or sweat, shoots at random and clings to the ground like a mole. Above all, he is frightened. The front line soldier says little: if questioned he might not answer at all, or might respond only by shrugging his shoulders. As a rule he walks around hungry and sleepy, not knowing what the next order will be or what will become of him in an hour. War makes for a constant familiarity with death and the experience of it sinks deep into the memory. Afterwards, in old age, a man reaches back more and more to his war memories, as if recollections of the front expand with time, as if he had spent his whole life in a foxhole."

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"The French ruled Algeria for 132 years. Only the Portugues in Angola and in Mozambique, and the Afrikaaners and English in South Africa, have had a longer colonial tenure."
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"The war in Algeria lasted seven and a half years and, with China's and Vietnam's, was one of the biggest wars of liberation...

The war ended in defeat for France. But Algeria paid a high price for their victory...

One tenth of the Algerian population--more than a million people--died in the war. The killed, the murdered, and the napalmed go by the name of chuhada--the martyred.

--The Soccer War, Ryszard Kapuscinski

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